Japan Raises Number People Exposed In Nuke Accident From 70 To 439

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Japan Says 439 People Exposed in Nuclear Accident

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan raised its estimate of how many people were exposed to radiation in the country's worst nuclear accident to 439 from 70, officials said Tuesday.

September's accident, which killed one person, was triggered when workers put nearly eight times the proper amount of condensed uranium into a mixing tank at a processing plant in Tokaimura, about 90 miles northeast of Tokyo.

An official of the Science and Technology Agency, which released the figures, said the calculation took into account local residents as well as plant workers who were not equipped with radiation monitoring devices at the time of the accident.

``This makes the number look bigger than the initial figures we reported,'' he said.

Of those affected, 207 were local people who lived and worked within a 1,148 ft radius of the plant. The rest were workers at the plant or those involved in the rescue mission.

Only three had been exposed to levels of radiation sufficient to cause after-effects and one of the three has already died.

Police last month inspected the site of the accident, continuing a criminal investigation into the plant's operators and its parent company.

Police have already raided the offices of plant operator JCO and parent Sumitomo Metal Mining Co to investigate possible legal violations, but had been unable to inspect the plant because radiation levels were still too high.

JCO officials have said the company illegally revised a government-approved manual to allow its workers to use buckets instead of a pump to transfer uranium solution into the mixing tank..

Police hope to complete their investigations and bring the case before prosecutors by the end of March, local media have reported.

-- E=mc^2 (@ .), February 02, 2000

Answers

sure was TEOTWAWKI for those folks

-- mush (mush@psicorps.com), February 02, 2000.

Hey, carry this bucket over there, would ya?, and oh, and try not to spill anything.

Little miss muffet sat on her tuffet eating her curds and whey, along came a spider who sat down beside her and said "whats in the bucket, bitch?"

Manual, again. Don't suppose thier computers are running in say, the 70's, would ya?

-- Electman (vrepair1@tampabay.rr.com), February 02, 2000.


Sure hope you people got KI pills-potassium iodide, brand name Thyroblock. Don't think it can't happen in the good ole USA. For the most part the japs are smarter than us, harder working, and more careful. get some pills (www.beprepared.com)

-- not (gonna@start.glowing), February 02, 2000.

Well, I'll kick this dead horse again.

KI (Potassium iodide) does one thing for you and one thing only -- if you take it BEFORE you are exposed to radioactive iodine (a fission product) your thyroid gland, which concentrates iodine, won't absorb the radioactive iodine in your environment, because it won't need iodine. Without the KI first, it would pick up the radioactive iodine, and you would later be at risk for thyroid cancer induced by the radioactivity from it. And that's it. KI does nothing else for you.

Eexposure to high levels of ionizing radiation from fission products carries health risks much more immediate and more serious than this. If, God forbid, you happen to be in the neighborhood of a nuclear accident, get somewhere else as fast as you can. And take your family with you. Even if you've loaded up on potassium iodide.

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), February 03, 2000.


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